New Mexico is the only state in the US where a noticeable mestizo (part European, part Amerindian) population has been around for a long time. If you’re interested in whether that population converges over time with the general white population of the US in academics or IQ, it’s the place to look – unless perhaps there is something fairly unusual about New Mexico. Ron Unz has suggested talented people have been leaving New Mexico long enough, in large enough numbers, to effectively change the population, something like West Virginia.

First point is that it is not that easy for for differential emigration to make a lot of difference. For that to happen, the emigrating fraction has to have a significantly different distribution of IQ than the population as a whole. You have to consider that narrow-sense heritability is significantly less than 1. Lastly, the fraction emigrating has to be relatively large, or emigration has to continue for a long time, or both.

There are states in the US where there has been a relatively large amount of out-migration, and West Virginia is one of them. There are others, most noticeably in the upper Great Plains, which have been hemorrhaging population since 1920 or so. New Mexico is not one of them, at least if you believe the Census results on net out-migration. North Dakota certainly has been such a state (until the recent oil and gas boom) – yet its NAEP scores are consistently among the highest in the country.
States where lots of young people leave have high median ages. West Virginia does, with a median age of 41.3 . New Mexico with a median age of 36.7, is just under the national average of 36.8 .

Do any of these stats support Ron’s notion? Nope.

Am I going to do a detailed, hammer-and-tongs criticism of Ron’s general argument? No, because (in my opinion) it doesn’t amount to much. An admixture study would give a definitive answer, one that avoids complications like intermarriage, and that’ll happen soon enough.

[addendum: the proposed mechanism for indumbnifying Hispanics in New Mexico can only work if IQ is highly heritable… ]

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58 Responses to New Mexico

Well, I’d hardly consider myself an expert on New Mexico grocery stores. In fact, I’m not even sure whether I’ve ever been to New Mexico. But here are a couple of points to consider.

On the anecdotal level, an amazingly high fraction of all the 3rd/4th+ generation Hispanics I’ve known all around the country over the years have told me their families originally came from New Mexico. That’s not too surprising since a hundred-plus years ago, the overwhelming majority of all American Hispanics lived in New Mexico or came from there. For example, at the time of the Mexican-American War there were supposedly only about 7500 Spanish-speakers in California and (I think) maybe 15,000 in Texas, while NW’s population was over 60,000. It seems plausible that over the 150 years or so, the more energetic and ambitious ones regularly moved away to less rural and impoverished states, just as in the case of WV and other Appalachian areas.

As for the current NM demographics, Cochran should be a bit more familiar with the details of his own state. Over the last few decades, NM has witnessed the same sort of massive Hispanic immigration as most of the rest of the Southwest, with the Hispanic population increasing by perhaps 200% since 1970. In fact, I think “illegal immigration” was a top issue in the last gubernatorial election. Recent Hispanic immigrants tend to be quite youthful, so it’s not surprising the mean NM age isn’t elderly, despite the traditional out-migration of the more able. By contrast, WV doesn’t have a gigantic immigrant population.

If you examine NM’s urban crime statistics, they tend to be very notable (negative) outliers compared to other cities with similar (heavily Hispanic) ethnic demographics. This tends to support my hypothesis, or at least requires some alternate explanation: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/his-panic/

But since I don’t regularly shop at New Mexico grocery stores, what do I know…

Two UCLA sociologists published a book about their cross-sectional study of Mexican-Americans called Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race.

Chief among their findings was that even after four generations in the United States, Mexican Americans still lagged significantly behind their white peers, and that assimilation stagnates after the second generation. The sociologists blame a lack of funding for the educational system, not differences in IQ, but that shouldn’t prevent others from coming to different conclusions.

On the anecdotal level, an amazingly high fraction of all the 3rd/4th+ generation Hispanics I’ve known all around the country over the years have told me their families originally came from New Mexico. That’s not too surprising since a hundred-plus years ago, the overwhelming majority of all American Hispanics lived in New Mexico or came from there.

The notion that many Hispanics in the US originated in New Mexico can only be described as ludicrous. I know Ron gets upset when people pour cold water on his ideas. Nonetheless, this idea is is absurd. 99.9% of the Hispanics in the US came here in just the last three decades, and they came here directly from their home countries – chiefly though far from exclusively from Mexico.

I suspect that Ron’s ideas about low Hispanic crimes rates and high Hispanic intelligence are likewise based on a sample of his (highly atypical) personal Hispanic acquaintances.

Puerto Rico has been part of the US for a long time. The Cubans arrived in the 1960s. Hispanics have been a large fraction of New Mexico for, like, ever. Most Hispanics in the US have arrived in the past 30 years or so, but nothing like 99.9 %

Until the wave of refugees produced by the Mexican Civil War of 1910-1920, the overwhelming majority of Hispanics in America probably had New Mexico roots. Not only had the Spanish-speaking populations of CA and TX been tiny in 1850, but they were immediately swamped demographically by the white influx, and mostly intermarried and disappeared, especially in CA. Since NM remained very heavily Hispanic, the ones there didn’t disappear in the same way.

But even with the gradual inflow of Mexican immigrants this century, the Hispanic numbers were totally trivial until just the last few decades. For example, Hispanics were estimated at just 1.4% of the national population in 1940 (I don’t think that includes PR), and even that recently I wouldn’t be too surprised if something like 1/4 of all American Hispanics had NM roots, when you include the ones who’d gradually spread out to CO and AZ. For example, back then CA had 13x the population of NM, but only 2x the number of Hispanics.

In 2008, 83% of Hispanics in New Mexico were native born, 17% were foreign-born.
In Arizona (2008), 33% of Hispanics are foreign-born.
In California (2010) 38% of Hispanics are foreign-born.

Hispanics in New Mexico are mostly descended from people who moved here before 1900 – although not entirely. And they’ll tell you so, loudly. Conquistadors! Which gets them into arguments with the local Indians – who have been here a long time too. Their test scores have not converged yet either. State-funded scholarships here have different pass thresholds, depending upon ethnicity.

In other words, as a percentage of population, the influx of recent immigrants to New Mexico has been much smaller than it has been in Arizona or California. I think that slower growth in New Mexico is one of the reasons: there has been a lot of construction in Arizona in recent decades, which generated lots of construction jobs. Employment in New Mexico has turned more on government, military, and high-skill jobs, as the NYTimes put it.
Why slower growth? Good question.

Mostly, the growth of the Hispanic population here as been due to natural increase, although that may change, as birth rates are declining.

The general approach of estimating demographic trends by sampling personal acquaintances generally suffers from poor statistical power, since most people don’t know very large numbers of people very well. Harder still to know statistically useful unbiased samples of smallish groups, like Hispanics who originated in New Mexico.

I think you’re still missing important aspects of demographic comparison between CA and NM.

For example, between 1970 and 2010, the number of Hispanics in CA increased by almost 500%. It’s perfectly plausible that only 38% of CA Hispanics are foreign-born, but the vast majority of the remainder are only second-generation. If you look at the longer-term Hispanic population trends, I’d guess that 95% of the average ancestry of today’s (self-identified) CA Hispanics is post-WWII. The overwhelming majority of CA Hispanics are 1st or 2nd generation, even though a majority may be American-born.

Now let’s consider NM. According to Census statistics, the NM Hispanic population increased about 200% between 1970 and 2010, not as fast as CA but still awfully fast for just 40 years. For example, during that same period, the NM non-Hispanic white population grew by only about 35%. Unless NM Hispanics are total rabbits compared to their white neighbors, it’s obvious that a very substantial fraction of the NM Hispanic increase came from immigration, just like in CA. I don’t doubt your figure about just 17% of NM Hispanics being foreign-born, but I’d guess that something close to half NM Hispanics are either 1st or 2nd generation, obviously much less than CA, but still a great deal.

By contrast, only 1% of West Virginians are foreign-born, and I’d bet that adding second-generation immigrants would only boost the figure to something like 2-3%. NM is a substantially immigrant state, while WV isn’t. I obviously never claimed that NM was *as* heavily immigrant as CA, which is right around the very top.

I found a 2010 report that listed what fraction of the Hispanic population of various states was recent immigrants, where ‘recent’ was defined to be the past five years. New Mexico was the lowest in the US, with 6.4% – and it wasn’t close. The next-lowest was 13.8%. Typical was about 25%, with the highest North Carolina at 51%. [ How high is Hispanic/Mexican fertility in the U.S.? Immigration and tempo considerations
Emilio A. Parrado Jorge A. Valencia Population Studies Center University of Pennsylvania]

As for Hispanics in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, sure, they’re from New Mexico. There are about 50k people in that valley, not all Hispanic. The Hispanics arrived in the 1850s, after the Army subdued the Utes. Once that happened they could just continue moving up the Rio Grande. They’ve been there a while now. I don’t think that their scores have converged yet.

As for fertility among Hispanics in New Mexico, used to be quite high, although it isn’t any longer. I have a friend with more than 20 siblings. Admittedly, that is only one instance, but my general impression is that families were large here for a long time among the Hispanics – maybe something like Quebec. At one time I looked at this a bit, when thinking about a nasty genetic disease, CCM1, cerebral cavernous malformation, mulberry-shaped vascular lesions that lay in the capillary bed of the brain and spinal cord – a nasty low-penetrance dominant than is common among the Hispanic families here, more common than anywhere else on Earth. A hateful disease: her son, who played with my kids, had to have brain surgery for it and still has some facial paralysis.

‘recent’ was defined to be the past five years. New Mexico was the lowest in the US, with 6.4%

Well, hasn’t the national inflow of Mexicans gone to zero or even reversed over the last few years? Maybe that has something to do with it.

But let’s look at the broader trends and do some thinking. From what I’ve read, demographers tend to use the Hutterites or Amish to model the approximate theoretical limit of human population growth given their typical age of marriage and fertility—I think they average something like 10-11 children. And as a result, their populations tend to double in less than 20 years, corresponding to over 300% growth in 40 years.

Now as I pointed out, during the 40 years 1970-2010 the white population in NM grew about 35% while the Hispanic population grew something like 200%. Unless the Hispanic growth had been substantially due to immigration, wouldn’t that put them in the general ballpark of the Amish? “High fertility” is one thing, but I’d think you’d need an *average* TFR of something 7-8 children for a couple of generations, with families of 15 children to balance out every spinster. I don’t know that I’ve ever been to NM, so maybe it’s indeed filled with brown-skinned Amish, but I’d really find that pretty surprising. For example, the Hispanics I know with NM roots seem to have averaged 1-2 children or so over the last 50 years.

Since the fraction of ‘recently’ arrived Hispanics in most states was around 25%, it is obvious that the slackening of Mexican immigration had not yet occurred at the time of this survey.

The first Census estimate of the Hispanic population was in 1970. Their estimate of the number in New Mexico, from the large sample (15% of records) indicated that the Hispanic population of New Mexico was 379, 723. The 2010 Census estimate was 970,000 970,000/379,723 = 2.55, a 155% increase.

There is reason to believe that this first Census attempt at Hispanic enumeration undercounted by about 10%, judging from studies in 1973 and the 1980 census.

The first Census estimate of the Hispanic population was in 1970…The 2010 Census estimate was 970,000 970,000/379,723 = 2.55, a 155% increase.

Correct. But the other Census figure for NM Hispanics in 1970 was 308,340, which would yield an increase of 215% by 2010. So the increases based on official Census estimates were between 155% and 215%, which I loosely characterized as “something like 200%.” Your lower figure may certainly be correct, but I don’t have a clue why the 1970 Census data would have such wide variance, nor can I judge the undercount claims you make.

But suppose we leave aside the divergent 1970 figures and look at the 1980 Census data, which you argue is more accurate. During the thirty years 1980-2010, the NM Hispanic population grew a bit over 100%, which still seems an extraordinary rate if almost entirely due to natural increase. By comparison, the CA Hispanic population grew 200% during that same period, but everyone knows that the vast majority of that increase was due to a massive tidal wave of immigration; I doubt the CA Hispanic natural increase was even close to 50% over those 30 years.

Here’s another maybe-useful stat. I took some info from the 2000 census, and looked at both the estimated fraction of illegals in several Southwestern states and the total Hispanic fraction of those states, reasoning that illegals in general are new immigrants. That ratio (total Hispanics /illegals) can be thought of as a rough indicator of the extent to which the Hispanic population of that state arrived recently. Larger values means that they’re not so recent.

For California, that ratio was 4.21

For Arizona, 3.94, pretty similar.

For Texas 5.6: not quite as recent.

For Nevada, 2.5: very recent.

For New Mexico, 18.89. Which is, I think, considerably larger than anywhere else in the country.

If you were interested in the academic performance of long-established mestizo groups in the US, you could look at finer-scale data in New Mexico. Although most of the state’s Hispanic population has been here a long time, particularly in northern New Mexico, some is certainly more recent, particularly near the Mexican border, for example around Las Cruces.

Of course, such sociological studies have already been done on second- and third- generations groups, in far more detail. They show that academic performance increases noticeably in the second generation, apparently due to better English proficiency, but does not increase much in the next generation. Judging from New Mexico, particularly northern New Mexico, performance remains stable for a number of generations after that.

Having raised five kids here, and having sent them to Hispanic-majority public schools, I have some experience of this. Not enough to trump a good statistical study, certainly – still, maybe not utterly useless.

Well, I spent a few more minutes hunting up some additional evidence on the possible long-term/more-recent Hispanic mix in NM…

As I’d mentioned, the NM Hispanic population increased over 100% from 1980-2010, while the white population grew just 21%. Now I’d assume at least of the portion of the white increase was in-migration, perhaps including a certain Cochran family, so unless there was also a great deal of Hispanic immigration, the reproductive skews between the two populations would have needed to have been astonishingly huge.

Now supposedly the theoretical maximum for human population growth is the Amish-type case, in which populations double something like every 18 years. So for the NM Hispanics to double in 30 years via natural increase, I think they’d need a TFR of around 6-7 children during those decades. Let’s investigate how plausible that might be.

The Census doesn’t seem to have national Hispanic TFR before 1990, but from 1990 to 2010, it averaged between 2.73 and 2.96, which seems an *awfully* long way from 6-7. Furthermore, all studies I’ve seen seem to show that recent Hispanic immigrants are the ones keeping the rate so high, with the second and later generations down much closer to 2. And under your model, the overwhelming majority of NM Hispanics are those later generations.

But maybe New Mexico Hispanics just crazy outliers in TFR compared to average Hispanics. So I located the recent Hispanic birth rates, as provided by the Kaiser Family Foundation. CA and TX together completely dominate the population of Meso-American Hispanics, and they have almost identical Hispanic birth rates. Meanwhile, the New Mexico Hispanic birth rate is actually a bit lower than in either of those big states. So it seems *awfully* unlikely that just a decade or two ago, NM Hispanics had triple the birthrate of all the other Hispanics in America.

I think the numbers require a great deal of NM Hispanic immigration over the last 30-40 years, and presumably there had been some more before that. I’d guess that if you took all NM Hispanics and apportioned their genetic ancestry, no more than about half would be 3rd+ generation Hispanic, and obviously less if you’re talking 4th or 5th.

In 1960, according to the Census, 2.6% of NM’s population was foreign born.

In 1970, 2.3%

In 1980, 4% .

In 1990, 5%.

In 2000, 8%

In 2006-2010, 9.7% 17% of the Hispanic population of New Mexico was foreign-born. In 1990, probably about 10%.

Probably about 80% of the foreign born today are from Mexico or Central America: the fraction was lower back in 1960 or 1970.

Most of the recent Hispanic immigrants are recent indeed. Certainly New Mexico has a far higher percentage of third-generation or more Hispanic kids than any other state, and relatively few new immigrants (as a fraction of the total Hispanic population). I think that Ron would expect Hispanics in New Mexico to have higher scores than Hispanics in any other state. But they do not. For example, on the NAEP 8th-grade math scores, the national Hispanic average score was 266, and the average Hispanic score in New Mexico was 262. Of course, New Mexico might have crappy schools: the white score in NM is also lower than the national average – it is also 4 pts under. The gap is just the same as the national average. There is zero evidence that long residence has resulted in convergence here.

The actual situation is probably somewhere between increasing admixture and continuous flow. At New Mexico (aka California) “grocery store” level, we should remember The Terminator and his mestiza domestic help case.

I would guess that ’emigration’ might have a big effect, and rapid, on reducing national intelligence if it was a matter of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the upper classes, the ruling class – who might well be a genetically distinct population either by reason of national origin, or by a long standing caste system – essentially when conquerors and colonists leave for one reason or another.

Some example might be the Republic of Ireland in the 20th century – who de facto expelled their Protestant/ English ruling class, which included just about the highest concentration of literary geniuses in the past several hundred years –

de facto expelled their Protestant/ English ruling class, which included just about the highest concentration of literary geniuses in the past several hundred years

The only example of a “Protestant/ English ruling class .. literary genius” living in Ireland at the time of its war of independence who you list was Yeats. Yeats, of course, was not expelled from Ireland, and was in fact an Irish nationalist who served in the Irish Parliament. This does not conclusively disprove your theory, but it certainly suggests that it needs some revision.

. “New Mexico is the only state in the US where a noticeable mestizo (part European, part Amerindian) population has been around for a long time”.
Which is likely connected tothe fact that “Farm labor contracting has existed in southern New Mexico for more than a century, bringing migrants “.

.According to Ron’s basic theory living in the United States for generations should have made Mexicans much smarter. However he says its rural living that keeps IQ low, and the New Mexico Mexican community are disproportionately rural . Ron’s theory is difficult to disprove, An anomaly is that recent immigrants from Mexico who currently live in Seattle are (I dare say) much smarter than those of Mexican descent living in New Mexico whose ancestors crossed the border a century ago, but they’re rural!

“Republic of Ireland in the 20th century – who de facto expelled their Protestant/ English ruling class”: and much of their Protestant working and middle class too. I wonder whether it satisfies the definition of an ethnic cleansing.

Is there any evidence or information about how different these populations are? Like, are new mexico hispanics genetically different in some way (more local indian admixture?) from hispanics coming to the US now?

Possibly less Amerindian admixture than the average for Mexico. The average ancestry for Mexico is about 40% Amerindian, 5% African, 55% Spanish, but it varies a lot, by geography and social class.

Klimentidis et a, 2009 found that ancestry among the Hispanics of New Mexico is about 33% Amerindian, 62% European, 6% African (rounding percentages). The same study found that that people self-identifying as Amerindian averaged about 25% European ancestry. The subjects were students at UNM, so they’re probably higher IQ than a random draw. One hopes. There is a fairly strong negative correlation between SES and the amount of Amerindian ancestry in Mexico: if that is the case in New Mexico as well, the amount of Amerindian ancestry in both groups is probably somewhat higher than seen in this study. It could be about the same as in Mexico.

The Hispanics thought they were considerably less Amerindian than they actually were, and the Indians thought they were less European than they actually were.

Mexicans entering the US today are not a random sample of Mexicans, either. I would guess poorer and more Amerindian than average, from what I have heard, but I don’t have data.

Mexicans entering the US today are not a random sample of Mexicans, either. I would guess poorer and more Amerindian than average, from what I have heard, but I don’t have data.

I too would doubt that there are any official statistics on the racial breakdown of Mexican immigrants, but one thing we do know is that they tend to come from the southern part of Mexico, which is somewhat more Indio than the rest of the country.

Although that seems based on the assumption that the Zapotec in that study have something like 100% Amerindian ancestry.

Not sure if that’s actually true – these structure analysis only show minima and maxima, the least mixed population will show up as “pure”, even if they’re very mixed compared to populations not included in the study (e.g. perhaps because they don’t exist in pure form any more).

The Zapotecs are the maximum in that study, but how would they square up if put in a sample with e.g. Xavantes Amerindians?

An admixture study would give a definitive answer, one that avoids complications like intermarriage, and that’ll happen soon enough.

The admixture studies already exist. Amerindian admixture is “strongly associated” with lower education and socioeconomic status in every Mestizo population tested so far.

Herrnstein and Murray found that Hispanics and whites matched for IQ had equal income and education. So we can hardly guess what this mystery variable is that makes a virtually invisible ancestry quantum lead to lower educational attainment in otherwise ethnically homogenous populations.

I’d do one looking at IQ rather than SES, or in addition to SES. There might be factors other than IQ that influence SES: the simplest one might be vulnerability to alcoholism. Many a smart man has been laid low by John Barleycorn. To me that seems likely to be at least somewhat separate from IQ: Aldh2 alleles, etc.

And even though behavior genetic studies show that between-family environmental differences (how you’re raised, wealth, etc) have almost zero effect on adult IQ (within the range of differences they’ve looked at), there still might be relevant environmental factors, maybe local ones, that reduce IQ. I don’t mean iodine deficiency – new ones, like green chili, for example.

Walter Jon Williams (in Days of Atonement, which I liked a lot) had a character suggest that there’s some kind of bacteria in New Mexico, a little bug that transmits incompetence.

I’m referring to this revisionist notion of yours that the southern Protestant population suffered a quietly state-sponsored campaign of ethnic cleansing. When the reality is WW1 death rate and subsequent intermarriage, political opposition to the new state, loss of priviledges etc. account for that decline. So, there was no “de-facto expulsion”. You also complain about this when your ilk have far more institutional power than you let on- UCD, TCD, Oxford, etc have all been captured by this Hart/Foster/Fitzpatrick nonsense. A core complaint of you types is the whiny Irish Catholic who never lets it go (a favorite trope of the not-so-American(ist?) HBD Anglophiles), and yet your entire interpretation of 20C history is just that: whining and myth- making. And I suppose it was Ted Kennedy who shoved them onto the boat back to London. I’m sorry you were burned out of your Big House, but it wasn’t done because you rejected Rome.

I don’t know who “you” is, but I should tell you that one of my grandfathers hailed from an Irish Roman Catholic slum. I’m interested to learn that this website has a blogger and at least one poster who approves of racist slaughter.

“You” refers to people like you and the above- mentioned academics who push this idea of a post-independence genocide. There was no slaughter, you fool, and even if there were it wouldn’t have been ‘racist’, but sectarian. The fact you have Irish Catholic ancestry is irrelevant to the issue at hand. (Just as religion in general was far less relevant than political ideology in determining who did and did not get shot in West Cork 90 years ago). So, no, you shouldn’t tell me that. What you should do is stop pushing this baseless, rubbish history of yours. I bet you still believe German U-boats were refueling in Kerry, or that the IRA were all closet Nazis. Or that the Germans ate Belgian babies. Lurid Tory fantasy is not reality, and neither are Bruce Charlton’s musings. Stop groveling.

Nothing to do with religion, Ireland was an example of rural overpopulation, and famine was seen as an inevitable result, just like the Bengal famine during WW2 ( Ukrainian famine was more deliberate and designed to kill off those who were eating up the surplus. The Nazis thought the Soviets had shown the way to cure the ‘rural overpopulation’ which the Nazis saw as the real problem holding back economic development in Eastern Europe.)

Again, the ‘big house’ English landowners were losing money on their Irish estates by the late 19th century. The British state wanted out of Ireland. Protestants were not really discriminated except in the civil service, most went to went to Trinity College which was not recognised.

Wikipedia article on Trinity College, Dublin: “the Catholic Church in Ireland forbade its adherents, without permission from their bishop, from attending until 1970. […] In the post independence period Trinity College suffered from a cool relationship with the new state. On the 3rd May 1955 the Provost, Mr A.J.McConnell pointed out in a piece in the Irish Times that certain state funded County Council scholarships excluded Trinity College from the list of approved institutions, this he suggested amounted to religious discrimination.”

I hadn’t heard about the idea that the population of West Virginia has become worse over time. But isn’t this a situation where the effect of people leaving would be cultural at least as much as genetic? If all of the top 10% of students in West Virginia public schools leave the state, that would affect everything else in West Virginia on top of (or even ignoring) a possible genetic dumbening process

If it is true about West Virgina, it sounds like the state has been mined in all senses.

I don’t know that it is true. But it is conceivable. Since between-family differences (how you’re raised) seem to have little effect on adult IQ, I wouldn’t bet on a cultural explanation.

It is conceivable, but it is not easy for it to happen, because, as I have said, it would require a very non-random emigration, and that emigration would have to be large. It is always hard (not impossible) to effect any significant genetic change in a generation or two.

This takes about five lines of code to model, using the breeder’s equation. I’m sure that people with strong opinions on this sort thing have run endless simulations of it.
I mean that I have.

I’m going to respond to this remark by Ron Unz here rather than in the thread it was left in, as it seems relevant.

Consider West Virginia. I’ve heard its white population is perhaps the most purely British-ancestry of any state, and certainly has American roots going back centuries. Meanwhile, the social, economic, and academic performance of those whites are absolutely dismal, perhaps the worst in the country. Just to cite one minor statistic, on an age-adjusted basis West Virginia whites are imprisoned at a rate three to four times higher than that of West Virginia Hispanics. Furthermore, most of the surrounding and also very heavily British-ancestry Appalachian region has similarly poor performance numbers.

In spite of what Mr Unz has “heard”, there is little to no truth to these claims. West Virginia has an extremely low crime rate. You can see the murder rate by state here.

West Virginia is ranked third from the bottom in household income, so I’ll give Unz one out of three. The odd claim about “West Virginia Hispanics” cannot be confirmed or refuted. However, Hispanics in WV make up just over one percent of the total population.

“West of this line, the average age of women at first marriage was 24 or more, men 26, spouses were relatively close in age, and 10% or more of adults never married. East of the line, the mean age of both sexes at marriage was earlier, spousal age disparity was greater and marriage more nearly universal.”

If you have a culture where marriage is at least partly based on personal choice and where a significant percentage never marry then it seems to me that – assuming attractiveness is at least partly related to genetic load – that kind of marriage culture would act as a mechanism for shedding genetic load?

“For example, suppose that only a certain fraction of people could mate – say the top 30% in fitness – while others never reproduced. That would severely limit the increase in mutational load, since each genetic death would eliminate many bad alleles. This model, truncation selection, is halfway plausible in a dog-eat-dog Malthusian world, but nobody knows how close it is to reality. Geoffrey Miller would suggest that sexual selection would ameliorate this problem.”

If so i think it follows – my math not being that great – that the effect would be proportional to population density?

“the number of slightly deleterious mutations does vary between individuals: the distribution should be Poisson, although with N large enough to closely resemble a Gaussian distribution. And this distribution might be modified by selection: people on the high end may suffer materially reduced fitness.”

So if you had two halves of the same population with the same marriage culture and the same average level of genetic load, one half of which settles in a relatively low population density rural region and the other half of which settles in a relatively high population density urban region the two halves might shed genetic load at different rates over the proceeding generations?

At the other extreme a marriage culture where children are married off early to spouses chosen mainly on the basis of relatedness would have very little sexual selection – maybe some on the female side if the number one son has a choice from among a number of female cousins – and hence might that marriage culture shed genetic load at a slower rate? Even in this case population density might vary the rate for the reason given above – in a low population density environment the number one son’s spouse may be chosen for him from a selection of three female cousins while in a higher population density case the choice might be out of six female cousins.

So it seems to me the combination of marriage culture and population density would effect the rate of genetic load shedding.

A couple of maps of Chinese IQ by province and population density by province (h/t loads)

Apparently – i read it somewhere – the Chinese show less of a Flynn effect than other populations? If that is true and there was data which broke down the Flynn effect by province and if the regions with the highest Flynn effect showed the opposite pattern to the above two maps i.e. highest Flynn effect mapped onto provinces with the lowest average IQ and lowest population density then the Flynn effect might be measuring the shedding of genetic load among the population being measured since higher industrialization / urbanization / higher population densities. If so it might also follow that countries with marriage cultures based on relatedness would have a lower Flynn effect relative to how much it was so.

(A possible explanation for the european late-marriage pattern – if female infanticide (as opposed to general infanticide due to visible physical disability) evolved as a method to keep the population a little below the Malthusian limit then the late-marriage culture (mentioned by Tacitus) might have developed as an alternative way of doing the same thing.)

There are states in the US where there has been a relatively large amount of out-migration, and West Virginia is one of them.

West Virginia has a net outflow because the US government has been waging an economic war against West Virginians’ right to earn a living for over 40 years. West Virginia did 4 things well: mine coal, produce steel, manufacture chemicals (yes, Union Carbide was poorly run), and generate electricity. And it did them in the place most properly suited for such tasks, a remote sparsely populated region with excellent access to transportation infrastructure, and within a days drive of a substantial portion of the Eastern US population centers.